Just Saying

Not to risk politics, but this is a useful demonstration of why budget policy matters all the time, even when times are good. Coming out of the 2001 recession, the CBO projected sustained and increasing budget surpluses. Granted, one should never put too much faith in the CBO baseline scenario coming true; it is based on current law continuing unchanged, even if it is highly unlikely.

This graph demonstrates what could have been. Any number of policy changes, especially less tax breaks and wars, could have given the government far more room and flexibly to act in a counter-cyclical manner.

A Follow up on a Follow up on the Futures Market and Gasoline Prices

Gas prices continue to fall, which was to be expected since that's the direction the futures market was going in anyway. But, the futures market is now expecting prices to drop more than before.

April Jobs Report

Job growth continued to slow in April to a disappointing 115,000 jobs added. There is some not bad news: more jobs were added in February and March than originally reported (red line on the graph). Though that isn't all that significant.

The unemployment rate dropped 0.1%, which was due mostly to the fact that around 340,000 people dropped out of the job market.

Commemoration

It’s been a year since Osama bin Laden was killed. So to commemorate, here are some facts: 

Polio still exists. It’s still endemic in Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Many curable diseases have a strong prevalence in the developing world and continue to hold people in poverty unnecessarily. Even when the cures are available for free, poor people are mistrusting of rich world governments and organizations that typically are seen as uninterested at best. There is a too common conspiracy theory that vaccine drives are just fake CIA plots to steal people’s DNA for whatever crazy reason. Well, that’s exactly what the CIA did to try to get the DNA of bin Laden children who were in the compound. They started a fake Hepatitis B vaccine campaign; they couldn’t even do a real one to cure people while they were at it. They even had the real vaccine, and wasted it by not giving people the full number of doses. 

How many people, with a real world example of the conspiracy theory in hand, lost any remaining trust in public health campaigns? How many diseases will go untreated? How many families will stay or fall back into poverty due to preventable illness? The counter argument is that such actions were necessary for finding Osama bin Laden. The same justification for why we had to torture people, one of whom gave up bin Laden’s courier they say. But I would rather people not think it's ok to torture people and destroy confidence in public health for their own ends. Especially given this:

Bin Laden’s influence and ability to inspire people was already degraded; for whatever reason, his importance had left him. The Arab Spring left him and everything he stood for behind, and ineffective by comparison. Even in Pakistan less than 20% of people thought he was doing “the right thing”. Given this perspective, his killing amounts to simple revenge. And I was just fine with that at first, he certainly deserved to be killed. But on the whole, we are worse off having taken the actions we did to kill him, and I guess that’s the problem with revenge.